DevKinsta for local WordPress development

I’m usually not a fan of ready-made local development environments. I had tried local (formerly by flywheel) by WPEngine after it got released for Linux. Even though that worked great, I never really used it as it didn’t speed up creating a new site significantly over what I was doing previously. I recently moved back to Windows, and I’m still in the process of finding my tools, I saw that DevKinsta mentions WSL on their site and decided to give it a spin.

On installation, it creates a directory on C:\ and windows immediately complains that having files outside the WSL environment will lead to poor performance. I then moved the location via the DevKinsta options to inside \\wsl$\. As my test site now responded with a 403 error, I moved it back to C:\. Even though DevKinsta claims to move previously created sites (it did move the files), accessing the site now failed with a PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR.

I deleted the site and set it up again—creating a new site is somewhat slow, it really doesn’t feel like this will speed up anything for me—which finally worked. Accessing the site’s “Hello World” in the browser has a pretty consistent response time of around ~1s, so I’m not convinced it’s running inside the WSL environment.

Activating the HTTPS option, unfortunately leads to a security warning in Firefox (I’m aware that FF has a certificate store independent of the OS’s).

To sum it up: I’m not certain I’ll be using DevKinsta moving forward. I’d have to test it with a proper site with plugins and a custom theme to see if the response time takes a nose dive.